Going to the moon & complaining about it

Admirable Bravery, Bogus Science — Moira Greyland’s Story

It’s reprehensible. Moira Greyland, the daughter of fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley and science fiction fandom figure Walter Breen, was abused by her parents. Now, she is abused by Theodore “Vox Day” Beale who exploits her tragic story in his effort “destroy the Hugo awards”.

Beale’s Rabid Puppy slate campaign gamed Greyland’s essay “Moira Greyland’s Story” on the Hugo ballot. It was published in an anti-gay rights blog called Ask the Bigot which probably tells everything you need to know about the context.

First, Greyland goes through her childhood experiences and her attempts to get her father convicted for his crimes. The subject matter is dreadful, but Greyland writes well and her story is powerful.

I admire her for her bravery. That admiration is hard to reconcile with the way I feel about the ending of her essay, however.

Greyland says that she thinks gays are more likely to molest their children than straight people. She backs the claim up with a link to a research by the ultra conservative fringe lobby group Family Research Council. What Greyland doesn’t tell (in case she is aware of it at all, of course) is that mainstream researchers have repeatedlydiscredited FRC’s “findings”. In addition to publishing bogus science, Family Research Council has been advocating the opinion that homosexuality is “unnatural” and “harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large”. Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them as a hate group.

I don’t think the essay should win a Hugo award, even though I sympathize with Greyland for all the pain she has gone through.

I won’t link to toxic stuff like this, but anybody who is that interested can easily google the article and see for themselves if I gave a true description of it.

That’s pretty disgusting. Would you tell Moira to her face that you consider her “broken” because that vile man is taking advantage of her anger? You know that survivors aren’t broken damaged things right? They’re people?

I wouldn’t even give her hateful opinions 1/2 a point… If she’d been molested by a priest and then wrote that all Catholics were predisposed to pedophilia, or had been assaulted by a person of color and was now saying all Blacks were predisposed to rape white girls, no one would hesitate to call out her hate speech. Being abused as a kid doesn’t excuse becoming hateful and abusive as an adult. Any sympathy I had for her awful childhood is lost when she starts lying about an entire group just because she perceived her parents as being part of that group.

There are evil and twisted people in all communities (including SFF fandom and LGBTIQ community), so it’s easy to see where her opinions are coming from. It’s hateful but I wouldn’t want to blame her of lying.

Family Research Council and other similar institutions, on the other hand, are knowingly deceiving people and lying through their teeth.

Speaking as a transgender lesbian, the most uncomfortable thing about Moira Greyland’s conclusions is that she may well have a point.

Judging by her description of Bradley and Breen, they held a specific philosophy relating to gender and orientation which they used to justify their acts of child abuse. The fact that Breen published a journal devoted to paedophilic “Greek love” would indicate that they were not the only ones in the LGBT community of the time to hold these opinions. To me, Bradley and Breen do not seem like molesters who happened to be gay/bi; they look like part of a distinct trend (if, hopefully, a minority trend) that existed in LGBT circles back then. This is something that I believe the LGBT community of today should have an open and honest discussion about.

Greyland’s post certainly has its flaws. It makes serious claims without citations, or with questionable citations. It makes no distinction between the LGBT community of Breen and Bradley’s era and the LGBT community of today (I would like to believe that any overlap between homosexuality and paedophilia at the time was, ultimately, the result of homosexuality being lumped in with paedophilia by a less permissive society). I do not agree with Greyland when she writes that “it IS the homosexuality that is the problem”, but I honestly suspect that she has part of the elephant.

I certainly would not call Greyland “abusive”. I would not even call her “hateful”. “Hateful”, to me, is the likes of Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps who built careers around opposing gay people.
Greyland hasn’t done that; she published a single blog post expressing honest opinions derived from her lived experience – albeit a post that has since been hijacked by a troll campaign with a vendetta against a tin rocket.

Yeah, she most certainly has nothing to do with the Rabid Puppies mess as far as I can tell. Whether one could describe the whole Ask the Bigot blog as hateful or not, I don’t know. You can maybe make the case for both views. The tone seems to be sort of respectful on the surface, but the goals behind it are a different matter.

You’re probably dead on about the pederasty activists taking part in the sexual liberation and gay rights movements back in the day. In Europe, the German Green Party (which is more or less a descendant of those movements) was involved in some kind of a scandal where a faction of it was connected to pedophile activism, if my memory serves.

From what I recall and have learned since, there were pedophiles who tried to piggy-back on the gay-rights movement back in the day. The majority of the gay-rights activists did their best to kick the Breen types out, especially since mainstream homophobes were already claiming that Those Scary F*gs would Come For Your Children if society let up on the repression.

Greyland was willingly publishing hate-speech on an anti-gay website (Ask The Bigot), and allowing her story to be used by another hate group (V.D. and Rabid Puppies). She cites a third hate group (FRC) to support her hateful rhetoric. Yes, I think that qualifies her as being “hateful”.

I hope Moira Greyland is okay. The things she says do incredibly upset me as a gay child of two parents who are both straight but also both sexually abused me. Sexual abuse isn’t about sexual orientation, it’s about power and control. I know the ways her parents justified their abuse of her were based in discussions of sexuality, but unfortunately abusers will warp anything to make it into a justification for their abuse. I don’t know. It’s a hard subject because I relate to her a lot, but also reading the things she say hurts me deeply. I just hope she’s okay.